Description: If you get only one piece of software on this page, this needs to be it. With Internet Explorer, your computer is privy to a legion of malicious scripts and programs that will install without your knowing. Firefox is a standalone version of the Mozilla suite, blazingly fast, with a whole host of skins and “extentions” to add functionality that you might miss in the default installation. Best of all, Firefox is available for damn near any OS: Solaris, Linux, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD. In short, this is easily the best web browser available.

Description: The long-rumored browser from Google is here! The marriage of the Webkit rendering engine, a new javascript VM called “V8,” and a simple, skinned UI, Chrome is still early in development, but show an incredible amount of potential.

Description: When the Mozilla Foundation officially stopped development of the monolithic Mozilla suite in favor of its separated children—Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird—developers were quick to reform under a different name and continue work on the suite unofficially, sharing development of the engine and doing their own work on the UI. SeaMonkey is basically Mozilla. Good if you want all the components and don’t mind the overhead of a monolithic application.

Description: Formerly only available in a paid or ad-supported version, Opera 8.5 is now free for the using, without ads. Opera is well-known for its speed, and has pretty good standards support (the engine is Opera’s homegrown renderer).

Description: While I happen to think that the proprietary interface is extraordinarily crappy (as well as not blending it at all with Windows’ native widgets), Safari’s “WebKit” rendering engine is open source and also excellent. A good alternative for testing, if nothing else.

“To be honest, I can’t see why one would pick K-Meleon over Firefox, but the performance and behavior is going to be largely the same”

TO be honest, you’re an idiot. the performance and behaviour are not even comparable. K-Meleon uses own windows widgets hence it’s a windows-only browser and not cross platform, it’s much faster.. way more responsive than firefox. try to be objective or test a browser before talking rubbish.